How r/WallStreetBets became one of the most crucial reads in finance
The latest generation of stonks traders is not like the others. For his upcoming book, “The Trolls of Wall Street: How the Outcasts and Insurgents Are Hacking the Markets,” Nathaniel Popper gives an inside look at the retail traders behind some of the meme stock frenzy, and what makes them different than stock pickers of yore.
It was almost a decade between the launch of WallStreetBets and the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. By then, millions of people had found Rogozinski’s subreddit and the strange culture that had grown out of that early trading contest. This had given a motley crew of teenagers and young adults an unlikely obsession with stocks, monetary policy and financial infrastructure, turning arcane topics into fodder for viral Reddit threads and racy TikTok videos. That would only increase once everyone was locked at home with little to do and, in many cases, with more cash sitting around than usual.
